I have exactly zero mtg cards left irl, but my cards were in such bad shape regardless. I just had piles of cards around my room, I was like scrooge mcduck w/ crappy fallen empires commons instead of gold pieces. but I mean, I was 9.

some of the early sets are pretty suspect though. Legends only exists because some guys at WotC wanted to make magic cards for their D&D characters. Fallen Empires was so weak that it almost sunk the game commercially before it really got started.

yeah definitely the best thing about the recent sets, like the past 4 or 5 years maybe, is that they've really gotten rid of the terrible unplayable cards like that. when you crack a booster now you're gonna get at least 10 cards that you might consider playing in a sealed deck or a casual constructed deck, with the old sets you'd get maybe half that.

though it did make the good cards that much more exciting when you did open them

i guess it's because i'm a bit younger than folks here and got to play w/ invasion, odyssey, etc when i was still a kid but i definitely like those sets just as much as the super-oldschool ones if not more

Way back in the day of NetDraft and Apprentice, we used to do Arabian Nights/Antiquities/Legends/The Dark drafts which were completely unplayable. You know all the overpowered stuff like Library of Alexandria, Mana Drain, Nether Void, etc. but you guys are right on with how incredibly bad the rest of those sets were. I remember the lands that just said things like "all your legends gain bands with other legends" and didn't even produce mana!

IMO set design only started to get "good" around Mirage. In fact Alliances is really the first expansion set that wasn't like, completely terrible. Even Ice Age had a ton of cards with these walls of text that ended up doing almost nothing. In fact I remember Necropotence going completely unnoticed because nobody could figure out what it actually did! (obviously it turned out to be the best card in the set and maybe one of the greatest cards ever)

yeah they were sorta designing sets on the fly until then, w/o really doing the leg-work to make sure things were balanced. even after they started doing it, people always found cards and combos to exploit that you wouldn't have thought of w/o a careful analysis.

IIRC this thing went up to nearly $100 a pop before it got banned. I remember somebody showing me this on a spoiler list and thinking that it was one of the best cards they've ever printed, then actually seeing it and realizing that it actually costed four instead of five and was even better, needless to say every blue deck needed to play it

yeah jace tms was a mistake, they basically designed it to be an all-powerful card, and it was, and people started quitting the game over it so they had to ban it in t2.

the planeswalkers they've made since then are much more build-around cards and less general-utility have-to-play-it ones, which is a bit of an improvement. i don't really mind planeswalkers but they feel more like a marketing triumph than a game design triumph, since they finally managed to create cards that are techy enough to appeal to competetive players and splashy enough to appeal to casual players at the same time.

i like the flavor of a lot of the early expansions but they are incredibly unbalanced. 'legends' in particular is a terrible set and all the legends are retarded, little attempt to think abt e.g. how casting costs should be balanced w/mana flow. according to the internet the early sets were developed half with the idea that they could be played as standalone so cards like camel or city or in a bottle make a lot more sense/are useful in that context.

banding can be really good but its sorta overused in the early expansions imo all those legends unique lands that granted banding &c

my least favorite thing abt the new sets is that they added 'equipment' instead of basic enchantments, i tried playing a sealed tournament early this summer with w/e expansion was coming out and i just didnt vibe it at all

my least favorite thing abt the new sets is that they added 'equipment' instead of basic enchantments, i tried playing a sealed tournament early this summer with w/e expansion was coming out and i just didnt vibe it at all

I like the equipment. The problem with creature enchantment is that your opponent can just destroy the creature and kill two cards for the price of one. I loved the ones that were "living weapons", that was a super cool idea.

what's funny is how baneslayer angel was a $40 card that was in a ton of decks one year, and then a $5 card that saw almost no play the next year

Basically, as long as this card is legal, no creature w/ 5 toughness that doesn't protect itself will ever be truly "broken". This gives them the freedom to print stuff that seems really stupidly powerful (like the Phyrexian Obliterator, WTF) without having to worry about things running away from them. Now the big beaters of choice are the Titans which is almost certainly because they are 6/6s

I think the problem is there's this idea that you always have to give people something fresh and different and inevitable you're gonna run into diminshing returns w/ new ideas that can fit within what 'works' within the dynamics of mtg

i think my biggest issue with planeswalkers is that they're so big and obvious. a lot of the strongest cards in magic's history look completely innocuous the first time you see them. like, for example, this card:http://magiccards.info/wwk/en/20.htmlspent the first year or so of its existence as a bargain bin rare. then one day some pro players decided to try it in their blue-white control deck. 6 months later, it's in every deck in t2 and gets banned.

i really like the idea that there are these awesome cards lurking out there that no one's figured out yet, and planewalkers really play against that discovery process by coming with hype already attached

equipment doesn't make sense, how can a pile of sludge have a battle axe or whatever and again, it's just not-mtg, artifacts already played that role

ehhh, that kind of plausability went out the window from the very first set. when you had Merfolk that lived underwater yet could still block land creatures. or the infamous Whooperwill, the bird without flying

i think my biggest issue with planeswalkers is that they're so big and obvious. a lot of the strongest cards in magic's history look completely innocuous the first time you see them. like, for example, this card:http://magiccards.info/wwk/en/20.htmlspent the first year or so of its existence as a bargain bin rare. then one day some pro players decided to try it in their blue-white control deck. 6 months later, it's in every deck in t2 and gets banned.

i really like the idea that there are these awesome cards lurking out there that no one's figured out yet, and planewalkers really play against that discovery process by coming with hype already attached

I think the game can exist with both. Stoneforge is a weird case because it really was not good when it first game out as there really wasn't any good equipment. I think it was pretty evident that it was going to be amazing if playable equipment was printed - it never should have dipped to only a buck.

In general I think it's not too tough to figure out what these cards are. I stocked up on Entombs because it was very efficient (one mana instant) and did something no other card did even though it didn't have a use in Type 2 - now it's $40. There were a bunch of Future Sight cards like that too, which were so unique and interacted with other cards in such strange ways that it's no surprise that some of them jumped so high. Tarmogoyf was the ultimate example, that thing went from $3 to about $80 in less than a year!

xxp Basically that one starts with 3 counters (the number in the lower right corner), then each turn you can use one ability by adding or subtracting the "cost" on the left. It can also be attacked and directly damaged as though it was a player. Kinda weird but overall pretty neat